I'm seeing a lot of tag-wiki entries in the review queues, and I was wondering how to deal with the guidelines in certain cases? I've read the guidelines and the 'Redesigned Tags Page' -- which only serves to make things a lot less clear.

To paraphrase, the guidelines say that we should no plagiarise other material (except for snippets with proper attribution), and that we should instead talk about how the tag is used within SO in general and the tag's community in particular. And, if the tag is common knowledge ('Java' for example), we should stick to talking about usage of the tag within the SO/Java community specifically, rather than explaining what Java is.

So, I'm lost because that's not how tags are written, and because this seems to lead people to write something along the lines of:

"Use this tag for questions referring to Java programming language or Java platform tools."

(Taken from the current Java tag excerpt.)

Well, given that tags only apply to questions, it's pretty obvious that the tag is to be used for Java questions, so the 'how to use this tag' portion of the guideline has led to some pretty superfluous verbiage.

The problem seems to be that for a lot of tags, the usage is pretty self explanatory, isn't it?

So, I've just been looking at the DCOS tag excerpt. It says:

This tag should be used for questions around the Datacenter Operating System (DCOS).

Most tags seem to just describe what the underlying tech is, and the fact that it should be used for questions is assumed to be the case. The current model seems to require us to state obvious things (like tags, which can only be applied to questions, should be used for questions), and remove useful things like a description of what the underlying tech is (such as dcos being a commercial mesosphere implementation for data-centres).

So, what to do? I think the DCOS tag excerpt is incredibly poor. The 'how to use' portion is pretty pointless and simply expanding the acronym is also quite unhelpful. Should I approve it? Well, the alternative is nothing at all so it's better than that, but it doesn't really meet the guidelines nor is it that useful. But, I'll accept it because it's better than nothing.

What do I want here? I think I'm asking for the guidelines to change because I don't think that they're working. I think they exist to try to encourage less plagiarism, but I think it's having an equally negative effect and something needs to be done to add clarity. Or, I'm looking for good examples of how this can work, so that I can know in future how to fix the ones that are wrong and how to write good ones myself?

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I'm asking for the guidelines to change

While that may be too broad to answer, it seems to me that the part from the guidelines that you're referring to is about usage and guidance. So here are some hints below.

From editing practice, I came up with those conclusions:

  • A tag excerpt is better than none (unless it's a copyright violation).

  • The shortest phrasing is the best. In that regard, the first words of an excerpt only need to be:

    • "About <Name of the tech>, an api for doing foobar..."
    • "Questions about <Name of the tech>, an api for doing foobar..."
    • "Related to <Name of the tech>, an api for doing foobar..."

    The benefit of such forms over Use for is seen on top of questions pages where the excerpt is displayed: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/dcos

  • There are too many tags to get a uniform presentation for them all, so it may only matter that tags from the same family (android-*, angular-*, etc.) have a coherent phrasing. By that I mean there is currently no need editing 100,000+ existing tags excerpts to add such two missing keywords. But reducing the length of the phrasing is OK, as "This tag should be used for questions around" is way too verbose and cluttering. → I've edited excerpt accordingly.

Now, if we look at possible edit reject reasons, we can read twice:


And following that given link, I really like, among other things:


So this is also recommended:

  • You don't need to mention lightweight, fastest, free, ... and other marketing vocabulary.
  • Having question examples "For questions on the protocol, the api, the UI, the migration, ..." is recommended.
  • Having some "Not for..." is also great, sometimes even mandatory when there is a known homonym.

Lastly, if you see a pattern (more than 5 tags) requiring improvement (like from a SEDE query) and you don't have 20,000 reputation yet, feel free to ask a so ready to help Trusted User in a chatroom to get the corrections eventually applied.

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